Five-Star Videos and More: Top 10 Elastic{ON}16 Presentations

Elastic{ON}16 was a rad experience. This was my first time at our annual user conference. It was so much fun and an amazing opportunity for meeting other users, asking questions of our amazing dev team, and learning more about the Elastic Stack.

For those of you who attended, I can't read all of your minds. So I can't say for sure that it was as much of an overwhelming and cool experience for you, but I did have a unique vantage point as one of the coordinators of the conference's official mobile app.

One thing that stood out in the mobile app comment feed again and again is that there were many great presentations happening across three stages, plus the Spotlight Theater, and the Birds of a Feather community chats in the lunch area. It was often hard to choose which talk to attend. We have proudly shared videos of all of the great Elastic{ON}16 presentations, and now want to provide you with a roundup of the most popular talks.

We had two criteria for selecting videos for this top 10 list: 1) top views on Elastic.co and 2) top-rated video (1 to 5 stars) by users from our mobile app. A handful even achieved the impressive average rating of 5 out of 5 — there are diamonds in the rough here!

So we narrowed the list down to the following 10 vids. We hope you find a presentation or two that you haven't watched, or maybe didn't even realize existed. Without further delay, enjoy!

Logstash's creator Jordan Sissel and team lead Suyog Rao wowed the crowd when they presented “The Latest in Logstash,” but this later talk — a technical deep dive with core developers Colin Surprenant and Andrew Cholakian — has been very popular on demand, earning a place on our list.

“Space… the final frontier.” Oh wait, this isn't about that awesome Star Trek vs. Star Wars string wall at Elastic{ON}16? My bad. This geo aggregations and visualizations talk is all about geo and Elasticsearch, and was given by core Elasticsearch developer Nick Knize, who self-describes himself as our “spatial agent.”

Probably the most anticipated and talked about new feature announced at Elastic{ON}16, Graph is now available for download. Elastic's Mark Harwood and Steve Kearns revealed Graph's power to discover and explore the relevant connections in your data sets.

"Here be math." The first talk on this list that was rated 5 stars out of 5 by you, attendees of Elastic{ON}16! Elasticsearch software engineer Britta Weber spoke about BM25, the scoring algorithm of Apache Lucene 6 that will soon be the new default scoring algorithm in Elasticsearch.

Enter Ingest Node: a new node type that will allow you to enrich documents before indexing. This is another talk — featuring Elastic's Martijn van Groningen, Tal Levy, and Jim Unger — that attendees rated 5/5 stars!

Also rated 5/5 is this gem of a talk on choosing the best size and configuration of your cluster. Presented by Elastic solution architect Christian Dahlqvist and Elastic technical trainer Ryan Schneider, this features the answers to important questions that so many of you have about sizing your cluster.

The first talk on our list that took place in the smaller Spotlight Theater location at Elastic{ON}16 is all about securing Elasticsearch. Software engineer Igor Motov and security engineer Jay Modi discuss common pitfalls for securing data, document- and field-level security, and why X-Pack will make integrated security across the Elastic Stack so grand.

You're not alone. That's the message that was sent loud and clear by Elastic's Chris Earle and Mark Walkom as they presented on the most interesting trials and tribulations our customers have shared with our support team. This talk was given five stars by in-app voting!

In one of the most popular talks from the first day of Elastic{ON}16, Elastic's Clinton Gormley and Simon Willnauer walked the audience through the breaking news and big developments for Elasticsearch, including pipeline aggregations, the query profiler, and much more.

We're very grateful that we were able to hang out with so many of our friends and colleagues at Elastic{ON} this year. If you haven't heard, we're doing it all again at Pier 48 next year. Hope to see all of you in San Francisco at Elastic{ON}17, March 7-9, 2017! Sign up for notifications.